How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 57

When a family's developmental stage is analyzed, four major sets of tasks and roles must be assessed:
(1) Parenting tasks and roles are concerned with the parent figures' ability to act as parents at a level
consistent with the age of the children;
(2) Marital tasks and roles assess how well spouses cooperate and share parenting functions;
(3) Sibling tasks and roles assess whether the children and adolescents are behaving in an age-appropriate
fashion; and
(4) Extended family's tasks and roles target the support for and intrusion into parenting functions from, for
example, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, if extended family members are part of the household or share in
parenting responsibilities.
Developmental transitions may be stressful. They are likely to cause family shake-ups because families may
continue to approach new situations in old ways, thus making it possible for conflict to develop. Most often,
families come to the attention of counselors precisely at these times. Of all of these developmental
milestones, reaching adolescence appears to be one of the most risky and critical stages in which drug abuse
can occur in most ethnic groups (Steinberg 1991; Vega and Gil 1999). Although the adolescent is the family
member who is most likely to behave in problematic ways, often other members of the family, such as
parents, also exhibit signs of troublesome or maladaptive behaviors and feelings (Silverberg 1996).
Assessing Appropriate Developmental Functioning
Careful judgments are needed to determine what is developmentally appropriate and/or inappropriate for
each family member. It is particularly difficult to make these judgments when assessing the tasks and roles
of children and extended family members. In every instance, the BSFT counselor should take into account
the family's cultural heritage when making these judgments. For example, it is useful to know that some
traditional African-American and Hispanic families tend to protect their children longer than non-Hispanic
whites do (White 1994). Thus, it would not be unusual for children to have a longer period of dependence
among traditional Hispanic groups than among non-Hispanic white families. Similarly, it would not be
unusual for the African-American caretaker of a 12-year-old to continue to behave in an authoritarian
manner without the child rebelling or considering it odd. In fact, researchers have suggested that AfricanAmerican inner city youths experience an authoritarian command as caring, while a child from another
cultural group might experience it as rejecting (Mason et al. 1994). However, as suggested earlier, as an
adolescent in the United States grows older, his or her parent, who may be from any culture and in any
setting, may have to moderate his or her level of control and increase his or her authoritative parenting, or
the youth may rebel.
Common Problems in Assessing Appropriateness of Developmental Stage
It is often difficult for parents to determine what is developmentally appropriate for children of different
ages; for example, how much or how little responsibility should a child 6, 10, or 16 years old have in a
household? In families of drug-abusing and conduct-disordered adolescents, parents and their children often
have a difficult time determining what is developmentally appropriate for a child's age.
One of the main problems family members encounter is how to determine the degree of supervision and
autonomy that children should have at each age level. This is a highly complex and conflictive area, even
for the best of parents, because as children grow older, they experience considerable pressure from their
peers to demonstrate increasing independence. It is also complex because many parents are not aware of
what might be the norm in today's society. Therefore, they may allow too little or too much autonomy,
based either on their own comfort or discomfort level, their own experience, and/or their culture. Moreover,
children's peer groups may vary considerably in the level of autonomy they expect from parents. In working
with the notion of "developmental appropriateness," a BSFT counselor needs to examine issues such as
roles and functions, rights and responsibilities, limits and consequences, as they are applied to the
adolescents in the family. Examples of these standards are available from adolescent development research
(Steinberg 1998).

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